Numerical analysis of the flow in a turbulated rectangular duct simulating the cooling passages in a turbine blade

Abstract

An extensive review of the literature revealed that many- experimental studies have been conducted in heat-transfer wind tunnels simulating the cooling passages in turbine blades. However, very few numerical studies have been performed. Phoenics, a computational fluid dynamics computer program, produced results for several duct configurations and calculat- ed the heat transfer characteristics of each. The configura- tions investigated included a straight, square duct and a rectangular duct with turbulators (a form of turbulence promoters) present. The parameters varied included Reynolds numbers, turbulence intensity and grid geometry. Results for the turbulated duct indicated highly distinct and repeatable flow patterns developed over a wide range of values. The variation of the inlet turbulence intensity had little impact on the kinetic energy. The results proved to be highly grid dependent, which greatly impacted the correlation between experimentally and numerically produced data, for the same configurations, under similar operating parameters.